


Sparks

by LookingForDroids



Category: Hiveswap
Genre: F/F, Marsti: Do the Medic Thing, Nontraditional Medicine, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-24
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:28:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26635123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LookingForDroids/pseuds/LookingForDroids
Summary: Marsti needs help, and for once, Folykl is just the right person to offer it.Every so often, the difference between kill and cure is not in the dose, but in the application.
Relationships: Folykl Darane/Kuprum Maxlol, Folykl Darane/Marsti Houtek
Comments: 13
Kudos: 26





	Sparks

**Author's Note:**

> My knowledge of first aid is limited. I did my best to fact-check and vague it up, but I welcome correction. I do know that tourniquets should basically not be used unless the need to quickly stop the bleeding outweighs the risk, but in this case, Marsti thought it did.

You’re not doing much and not planning on doing much when the message alert hits your palmhusk, just chilling, killing time. You figure it’s your little alien buddy, because there sure aren’t a whole lot of trolls you’re on speaking terms with. There’s Kuprum, who’s currently allowing you to use him as a pillow while he plays Cull of Duty and you trash talk the entire rest of the server over your headset, and Marsti, who doesn’t text when she’s working, and maybe a few trolls who can be relied on to sell you shit without summoning the drones – but when you check your palmhusk, it’s not the alien. It’s her.

clandestineAblutionist began trolling abyssalAgitator

CA: Hey -_-.

_Dash-separation plank-dash-finish crumb._ Your hacked-together screenreader has accumulated all sorts of extensions to deal with people’s idiotic quirks, but you kind of like hers and you kept it unchanged. It doesn’t hurt that you know it’s her face, and the number of separation planks you have to listen to in a row is a reliable indicator of how done she is with everything.

CA: Going to be late tonight -_-. It’s a work thing -_-.  
CA: Might have to cancel -_-.

Which is fine – good, even – because this has not been one of your better nights, and right now you’re not sure you want to deal with anything more strenuous than curling up on Kuprum’s lap for a little while longer and listening to him pwn highbloods who don’t know how to aim. But somewhere beneath the fog of exhaustion, it occurs to you to worry. Marsti isn’t in the habit of ditching you so she can spend time scrubbing dirt off a wall somewhere, not least because she’s decided that scrubbing dirt off your bare-ass scrawny body is more interesting and also gets her laid. Whatever’s come up, it’s something serious, and you don’t waste any time before texting back.

AA: danger?

CA: I’m fine -_-. Just a thing -_-. Tell you later -_-.

Then she signs off, and you settle back down, trying not to let it get to you. Marsti can and will take care of herself. She doesn’t need you to do it for her. 

Kuprum must feel the way you go tense, because he snakes a hand under your sweatshirt and zaps you just enough to take the edge off the pain and the chill that’s been creeping back into your muscles. You sink back against his thorax, deploy a few insults over the headset, and work on putting the worst of the worst-case scenarios out of your mind.

A moment later, your palmhusk pings again.

CA: You with Kuprum -_-?

AA: yeah

CA: Can he get you to 36th and Maim ASAP -_-?   
CA: No danger but need help -_-.

Yeah, OK. That’s good, probably. You are definitely not anywhere in the vicinity of afraid. You elbow Kuprum, and tilt your phone up to let him see. He takes one look and tosses the controller aside, giving approximately zero shits when his character expires with a messy computerized scream, because your moirail is pretty great sometimes.

“Was getting bored of wiping the floor with these losers anyway,” he says. “Let’s go crash your hot matesprit’s party.”

He skips the backpack, just hauls you up onto his shoulders and flies as fast as he ever has. The wind is blowing in your direction, cold and edged with the slight acrid tang of acid rain on the way, and as the two of you rise above the city, you catch the scent of smoke drifting from Maim Street and find yourself gripping Kuprum’s shirt a little tighter. There’s something else there, too, fainter but unmistakable: a little flare of light, unsteady, bleeding energy in volatile pulses. There’s a kid somewhere down there – a psionic, strong enough for you to sense even at this distance – and you’re pretty sure they’re hurt.

_No danger,_ Marsti had said, but you’ve managed to get some idea by this point of her approach to calculated risks. You dig your grasp-nubs into Kuprum’s hair and tell him to hurry.

“Holy shit,” he says, as you get closer, and as he descends, it becomes immediately obvious why. There’s no sound of fighting now, but the scent of discharged energy weapons hangs in the air, almost as heavy as the smoke. The psionic you’d sensed is on the ground, face up and rigid, fountaining sparks from their eyes and the tips of their horns; you can tell when the wind blows something into their radius, because lightning arcs out and leaves it briefly incandescent. You can barely make yourself focus on anything else, but there are other trolls here too; some of them sit or stand in a loose cluster, some lie motionless, and some hover just outside the reach of that energy field, unable to get closer. Marsti is one of those. You can get a clear read on her by the time Kuprum touches down, standing at the edge of the crowd and bandaging someone’s shoulder. She’s fine. Not hurt. Safe, as long as she doesn’t take one more step towards the livewire on the ground. You can tell she wants to, and you’re sure she would if there was even a chance that she could help, but she’s not stupid and she stays where she is. There’s nothing even a trained mediculler could do about this except let it run its course and hope it doesn’t burn the kid’s thinkpan out in the process – but a psionic meltdown is like the one dangerous thing in this whole shitty universe that you’ve never needed to be afraid of.

Actually, you want that shit like a thirsty Clown wants Faygo, which is not the most unselfish thought you’ve ever had in your life, but you’re not going to waste time pretending it isn’t true. Marsti told you to haul ass over here for a reason. You drop down from Kuprum’s back, wincing as the ground jars your knees, and cross the distance as fast as you’re able – which is fucking fast when it’s something like this on the line. You know what’s going to happen when you grab the kid’s hand. You’re braced for it. You still can’t help the sound you make when power arcs into you in a white-hot flash, leaving no room for cold or pain, or the way your whole body goes limp with relief. But you haven’t forgotten why you’re here, and the kid is _definitely_ hurting. Their skin is colder than it should be, clammy with sweat. As you sit on the curb beside them, you can smell blood and scorched plastic and the ozone scent of air after lightning.

The instant the light show dies down, Marsti sprints forward, already pulling on a new set of gloves. She drops to her knees at your side and shoves something under one of the kid’s strut pods to prop it up, and between how weak she is and how fast she’s moving, it’s hard to tell exactly what she does after that. But that’s probably a strip of fabric in her hands, and – yeah, OK, she’s tying a tourniquet. The kid flinches as she tightens the bandage, and another power surge hits you without warning. Marsti doesn’t even react. You’re sure she must have felt it, but she just keeps working, staunching the bleeding, not bothering with comfort. You just keep sitting there, gripping the kid’s hand, trying to remind yourself that you don’t actually care about what happens to trolls who aren’t Kuprum or Marsti. This is the first time you’ve ever touched someone with the intent of saving their life, and it’s hard to say how you feel about that. It’s easier than killing, but fuck if it doesn’t scare you more. 

Marsti knows what she’s doing, at least, and the only thing she needs you to do is keep this fucker grounded. She calls for snuggleplanes, water, some helpful minion to pack the snuggleplanes around the kid and check their bloodpusher, and as she’s shouting orders, she grabs a bottle from her bag and pours something soap-scented out over the wound in their leg.

She dabs at the surrounding skin with some kind of cloth or sponge, and now you can tell that she’s being gentle, making low, meaningless, soothing sounds as she works. You figure that’s a good sign, but when she starts doing something careful involving maybe-tweezers, you start to worry. This kid is strong. They’re also hurt, and second by second, you can feel their psionic field getting fainter. You’re going to have to let go soon, or risk doing worse than whatever fucked their leg up so badly.

Or you need Kuprum. That would work too. You shout his name, and then he’s there, grabbing the kid’s other hand, feeding a slow current into them. It helps. Gradually, the field grows stronger, more coherent, stable in a way that doesn’t rely on you. Whatever this kid did to overextend themself, you’re starting to get the sense that what you and Kuprum are doing to keep them steady might be as necessary as the first aid.

Not just any psionic can manage that. Most spend their time throwing heavy shit around and blasting everything that gets in their way, and OK, he’s like that too when something pisses him off. When he’s calm enough, though, he’s got the control to manage both your energy drain and the unpredictable power fluctuations of a living system spiraling out of control. Necessary skill where he’s headed, he told you once, and between your pride and your anger, you didn’t know what to do except call him an idiot and pap him into a daze. Before tonight, you never thought about how useful it could be for something like this. You’re pretty sure he never did either.

“Kinky, LOL,” he says, but he sounds shaken in the same way that you feel shaken, clutching the hand of a kid who almost died and still might.

“Not as kinky as your lusus gets during drone season,” you tell him with an obscene grin. He laughs and tells you to shut up, and that’s enough to get him to stop freaking out like a wiggler.

“Both of you shut up, I’m trying to work,” Marsti says, but she’s not angry, just terse, trying to keep her hands steady as she cleans and then stitches up the wound. She’s complained before about only being able to get her hands on weaksauce lowblood shit or dangerous drugs for local anesthetic. The kid whimpers, and you squeeze their hand in a way you sure hope is reassuring, ignoring the way their claws cut into your skin. It hardly even hurts. Considering the sheer voltage they’ve poured into you, the least you can do is not make a big deal about a few scratches. 

As focused as you are on that, you almost don’t notice when Marsti switches over to bandages. You don’t realize she’s done, either, until she breathes out and lets her shoulders sag, just for a moment, before standing up and backing out of the psychic danger zone.

“Right,” she says. “Try letting go.”

You wait for Kuprum to get clear, then drop the kid’s hand, ready to grab it again if you need to. Nothing happens. They lie limp on the ground, breathing shallowly; energy disperses through their limbs in weak, uneven flashes, then stabilizes again, and this time it stays stable. They’re alive. They don’t seem to be actively dying. A few seconds pass, and you nod: all clear. Meltdown over, burnout hopefully averted.

“You there,” Marsti says to her minion. “I’m going to remove the tourniquet now. Keep an eye on him until I tell you to stop, and if he bleeds through the dressings, give me a shout.”

Immediately after, she turns to you.

“I’ve got more to do here,” she says, sounding tired. “You can stay or leave, and either way I’ll make it up to you later, but – thanks for doing that. He’d be dead without you. Both of you, probably.”

“No big,” you say. “Not like I had anything better to do.”

“Can’t let my girl have all the fun,” Kuprum adds, but Marsti isn’t listening. As soon as the kid’s tourniquet is off, she’s hurrying away to treat someone you can’t help her fix.

In her absence, you become aware of how many other trolls there are, dim blurs and brighter, more defined silhouettes stopping to watch or hanging out of windows overhead. You can feel them watching you – all three of you, probably, but this is a lowblood neighborhood, and that means there’s bound to be someone here who can recognize voidrot when they see it. You leer at the rubberneckers and flip them off with both fingers, and Kuprum hauls you back up to his shoulders with one arm and a surge of psionics that prickles against your skin. You hook your arms around his neck and your legs around his waist, lean against him, and hang on.

“The first one of you bulgesuckers to call the drones is going to get fried,” he says, loud enough for his voice to carry. Mutters rise from the throng, too quiet for you to hear clearly. Marsti, already busy with another injured troll, lifts her head to call, “And the next one gets beaten to death with a scrub pole.”

“They were already here,” a girl near the back says. “We don’t want ‘em back.”

She’s a psionic too, so strong that you can sense her looking in your direction, but you have no idea what kind of expression she’s got on her face, and right now, you really don’t care. You look back to the kid on the ground, instead – the one you helped save, and thinking about that is like poking at the edges of a healing bruise. It kind of hurts, but not in a bad way. You can’t stop worrying at it, turning it over in your mind: someone is alive right now because you were there to keep him that way. And maybe next time he encounters a troll with a void where their eyes should be, he’ll forget what he might have heard about parasites, and remember why he’s still alive.

Or maybe not. You know why it is that you’re still alive, and it’s not an overdose of optimism. But the kid lifts his head like it costs him something, says, “Hey,” like it costs him even more, and yeah, you know the feel. 

“Hey, yourself, asshole,” you say, but you soften it with a smile. You feel like your thorax is full of sparks, like you could fly if you wanted to – just like you did for the first and last time when you were a wiggler, on the night you realized that something was really, _really_ wrong. What would happen if you actually tried to fly is you’d spend maybe a second or two hovering just off the ground, then land hard on your ass and spend the rest of the night shivering and semi-conscious. So you drop back down from Kuprum’s shoulders instead, and you sit there on the curb with your arms wrapped around yourself, feeling warm and bright.

It would be smarter to leave. You’re not needed here. But Kuprum says Cull of Duty can wait, so you stick around.


End file.
